


edge-stepper

by patrokla



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Amnesia, Drug Use, M/M, Post-Episode: s02e10 This Is Not For Tears
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-16 16:14:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28709517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrokla/pseuds/patrokla
Summary: If Kendall really is wandering around out there without his programming, well. Stewy would like to see what that looks like.or, Kendall might have amnesia. Stewy might be willing to help him out.
Relationships: Stewy Hosseini & Kendall Roy, Stewy Hosseini/Kendall Roy
Comments: 4
Kudos: 33





	edge-stepper

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two weeks ago I started thinking about what kind of results you could get if you threw the amnesia trope at Succession, and now here we are. Title from Heidy Steidlmayer's poem "I Say So Long to the Hedge Rider," epigraph from Owen Pallett's song "The Miner Becomes Forgetful."
> 
> Warnings for this part: referenced drug use and overdose.
> 
> You can find me posting about this fic on [tumblr](https://leguin.tumblr.com/tagged/working-title%3A-the-elsewhere), where I'm just having a time.

_Oh memory, all ears and eyes_   
_Preserving, pruning, preening every leaf of every lie_   
_It's not your fault, it's not my fault, if every fault should find its way  
Into our suppers_

—

It takes three weeks for anyone to fill Stewy in on what had happened to Kendall after the press conference. 

It’s Cousin fucking Greg, of all people, who spills the beans to him. He’s at that cafe on Broadway, the one he’d stopped going to a year back because they never put enough chocolate in their _pain au chocolat_. But he stops by on a whim, indulging in a latte and the thinnest slice of sentiment - it was where he and Kendall had begun making the deal that got Stewy into Waystar Royco, and despite all the mess, it was a deal that was about to be very profitable for Stewy.

He’s just grabbed his latte when a giraffe of a man steps in front of him and starts stammering out a greeting. Stewy’s first instinct is to take a step back, which he does, and then he cranes his neck up to look at the guy’s face, resenting the necessity of the motion, and begins to recognize him.

“I remember you,” he says, and the guy starts nodding eagerly, greasy hair flopping across his forehead.

“Yeah! Yeah. I’m Greg, uh, Gregory Hirsch? You might know me as Cousin Greg?”

“You were at that press conference,” Stewy realizes. “That was a bold move, hitching yourself to Kendall’s broken wagon. Why’d you do it?”

“Yeah, I don’t know, it seemed like a good idea at the time,” Greg says. Stewy thinks he might be high; he’s speaking so quickly and barely takes a breath before he launches into his next sentence. “Look, I’m actually here because I thought you might be able to help me? I’ve got information, inside information on what’s happening at Waystar right now, and I think you should know what it is.”

Stewy makes a face at that, the guy’s naked desperation and scheming. It turns him off, honestly, ruins his buzz, harshes his mellow - any euphemism out there for mood-destroying repulsion, he’s feeling it. 

“I’m gonna be honest, dude, this -“ he gestures with one hand, the one not wrapped around the latte he wants to be drinking right now, “this is a bad look. You need to work on your pitches, Cousin Greg.”

“Right, yeah, I get that, man, uh, it’s just. Look honestly, while I would like to fix my current situation of unemployment, I’m really here about Kendall. To tell you about him, I mean.”

Stewy considers just stepping around Greg’s uselessly lanky body and continuing on with his morning, but the same bit of sentiment that brought him here in the first place keeps him there now, looking up at Greg with growing impatience.

“Tell me or don’t tell me,” he says. “I’m sure I don’t need you to find out whatever it is.”

“Yeah, I don’t know about that,” Greg says. “They’re keeping it all locked down pretty tight, you know? But I was there when it happened, so that kind of - like, they would’ve had to kill me to keep it totally quiet, ha. Um. Anyway, the thing you should know is - so, Kendall had like, a massive overdose.”

“Kendall overdoses every other week,” Stewy says, and now he really is annoyed by this Cousin Greg. “Did you come here to waste my time on purpose? Or did you really think this would be news to me?”

“No, it’s not just the overdose,” Greg insists, moving to block Stewy as Stewy tries to go around him. “He’s lost his memory. I’m not really in the loop now, what with the whole betrayal thing, but I think - like, I’m pretty sure he still doesn’t know who he is.”

And that, well. That’s interesting. He briefly considers how useful such a malleable Kendall would be for the takeover, and concludes that, at the very least, it won’t hurt to have more evidence of the Roys being fucked up little aristocrats who can’t be trusted with the third most valuable company in America. So he jerks his chin at Greg as he walks past him.

“Come on,” he orders. “We’ll talk in my car.”

—

The story, as Greg tells it, his sentences peppered with ‘um’s and ‘like’s and hesitant little pauses, is something like this: After the press conference, Kendall had understandably tossed his phone and gone back to his apartment to get blitzed. The building was crawling with paps, so he’d headed over to Greg’s with a backpack of, according to Greg, “illegal drugs.” He’d snorted everything he’d had, drank everything Greg had, and then summoned a host of idiots over to the apartment to “celebrate.” Some of those idiots brought more drugs, and at some point in the night Greg had made it up to the loft to find Kendall passed. So far, a normal Thursday night for Ken. Then he’d started seizing. 

Greg doesn’t know much beyond that. He’d called the Waystar medical team, and while they’d let him ride in the helicopter over to Columbia, he’d been kicked out pretty quickly after they’d had gotten in touch with the rest of the family. 

“But I have an inside source, if you will,” Greg tells him, hunched over in the backseat, “and he - they, they said that Kendall’s, like. Like he has amnesia or something. He woke up and didn’t know anybody, and I guess he’s still like that.”

“Fuck,” Stewy sighs. He’s already regretting inviting Greg into the car, inviting all of this fucking Roy family drama even further into his life. “So why exactly did you need to tell me this, Greg? Aside from trying to get a job as my fucking lackey?”

“Well,” Greg begins, “you and Kendall are friends, right? Like, you care about him?”

“We’re not friends,” Stewy says, which is true. They haven’t been friends in a long time, Kendall and him. He’s not sure what they are right now. If what Greg’s saying is true, they might not be anything at all. 

“Okay, but - like, my source said you care about him,” Greg says. “And you have, you know, a lot of money.”

“I do,” Stewy says, “but you’re losing me again, Cousin Greg. There’s not much I can do for Kendall that the world’s most well-motivated medical professionals can’t. So if that’s all…”

“No!” Greg says loudly. “Sorry, I just, I haven’t had anyone to tell about this besides my mom, and there’s a lot of moving parts, you know? Sorry. The big thing is that I, I’m getting the impression that Uncle Logan doesn’t want Kendall to get better. To remember, I mean. So I thought - it just seems like he needs somebody in the room who cares about him, you know?” He pauses, and glances away from Stewy before saying, “I wish I knew more, but my source isn’t like, the most inside they could be. Like, they’re on the porch.”

“The porch?” Stewy repeats incredulously. “Never mind. Who’s your source?”

“I really can’t say,” Greg says, and for the first time that morning he sounds like he has an actual backbone, not just an absurdly long slinky where his spine’s meant to be. 

So Stewy makes eye contact with his driver in the rearview mirror and nods deliberately. It’s only a few seconds before the car door on Greg’s side is being opened, and Stewy waves a hand towards it.

“Thanks for the info, Cousin Greg,” he says. “You can tell your source that I don’t work with people I don’t know.”

“But-“

“Out!” Stewy says sharply - snapping, almost, which he tries to avoid. Greg is pushing him to his fucking limit. “Get out.”

Finally, half a second before Stewy tells his driver to drag Greg out of the car, Greg scrambles out, almost elbowing Stewy in the face as he goes. Then the door shuts, and Stewy is briefly alone in the car. He takes the moment to sort through everything Greg’s just dropped in his lap and pick out the useful bits. It’s going to be messy, he can tell already, and the mess might outweigh any potential value. If he can forget what Greg’s just told him, focus on the upcoming shareholder vote and the way Logan Roy is about to be jettisoned from his own company -

But he can’t. It could be the nail in Logan’s metaphorical coffin, and on those grounds alone he should figure out what’s going on. He’s intrigued by it, too. If Kendall really is wandering around out there without his programming, well, Stewy would like to see what he looks like. If things are bad enough, he might even want to help.

Really what it comes down to is that there’s a world where Stewy doesn’t have thirty years of experience with Kendall Roy stuck like grit in his teeth, inescapably present. But that’s not the world Stewy lives in. By the time his driver is back behind the wheel, Stewy knows what he’s going to do.

“Take me to Queens,” he says, then rattles off Rava Roy’s address. He thinks about feigning the need to look it up, but discards the idea. Rava is single, Stewy is Stewy, and if the press somehow gets ahold of this particular detail he’ll have one hell of a distraction to throw at them. 

He’s got a contact at a medtech investment firm who has contacts at Columbia; it should be an hour before he has Kendall’s medical chart sitting in his inbox, tops. He pulls up the contact’s info, then pauses, and sends a text to Sandy.

_Free tomorrow? Interesting developments on the front._

It’s barely a minute before Sandy replies with his usual lack of disregard for Stewy’s schedule:

_Free tonight. Catch me up on my favorite drama :D  
_

Stewy rolls his eyes and texts back a thumbs up emoji. Then he gets to work.

—  
  
Rava opens the door with a harried sigh and no greeting, just a flat “Did Ken put you up to this?”

Stewy almost laughs at that, but he knows it would piss her off, and for once he’s trying not to piss her off.

“No,” he says, angling her tone back at her, projecting his most serious ‘I’m not fucking around here’ vibes. It’s all in the eyebrows. “Kendall didn’t send me here. Can I come in?”

She gives him a hard stare - well, not hard. More like semi-firm. There’s some give in the look, the same lack of inflexibility that Stewy assumes led to her and Kendall fucking for so long. It’s a weakness, for sure, but her impending divorce suggests it’s not a fatal one.

“Fine,” she says. “I have ten minutes.”

“That’s plenty,” Stewy says.

She waves him inside and down the hallway, to the living room. It looks the same as it did four years ago, at least from the little he remembers - Kendall clearly hadn’t taken much when he left.

“I’m assuming this is about Kendall,” Rava says, sitting down on the edge of the couch.

“You assume correctly.” He settles onto a chair, and for a moment they exchange a look of grim solidarity. Despite their best efforts, it did always seem to be about Kendall.

“I need to know if you’ve heard from him in the last few weeks. Since, say, the press conference.”

“No,” Rava says immediately. “Just his lawyers.”

“His lawyers? Oh, for the _divorce_ ,” Stewy says. “Just out of curiosity, how is that going?”

“How’s your attempt to take over Waystar?” Rava rejoins, and Stewy smiles.

“It’s going excellently, thank you. But I’m not here about that.” He leans forward. “Look, I’ll cut to the chase: I’ve heard Kendall’s been in the hospital since the press conference, and it’s serious.”

Rava winces, and presses her fingers against her temples. Well, fair enough. Stewy wouldn’t be thrilled to get that news if he had kids with Kendall either. “Shit, really?”

“I haven’t been able to confirm it directly, for obvious reasons. But…” he trails off, and Rava presses harder for a moment, then sighs and drops her hands.

“Well, that would explain the dropoff in sexually aggressive texts he’s been sending at 3 am,” she says. “Fuck, I knew he was using again, I just thought - I mean, the whole family closed ranks last year. I’ve barely spoken to him in months. Honestly, I assumed he wouldn’t have the space to do anything this stupid.”

“Logan’s kept him on a tight leash,” Stewy acknowledges. “Clearly not tight enough.”

“Right,” she says. “So you want me to try and see if anyone will talk? Did you forget about the divorce?”

“You have leverage,” Stewy says. “The kids - that’s enough to get your foot in the door.”

“Maybe in a family that’s only normal levels of fucked up,” Rava says bitterly. 

“It’s worth a shot,” Stewy presses. “Look, Rava, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have to be. You know that.”

It’s been years since he was actually allowed here, in point of fact. When Kendall was getting sober, Rava had made it clear that Stewy wouldn’t be welcome if he wasn’t going to respect Kendall’s “struggle,” and Stewy had made it clear that he was too old to have someone hovering and passing judgement on what he did or didn’t have in his pockets. It had been ugly in a way he rarely let his life be, put a permanent chill on his friendship with Kendall and completely destroyed the unstable, uneven, but occasionally entertaining dynamic that the three of them had shared since college. He doesn’t regret it, not really - it’s not like he’d ever wanted to go through life as Kendall Roy’s closest friend, nor has it ever particularly benefited him. But he does regret how juvenile it had felt, like the kind of playground fights Kendall had dragged him into at age 8. At 38, he was well past wanting to be involved in Kendall’s little vendettas.

Primarily, though, the whole petty drama had made him resentful. He didn’t like being pinned down as An Enabler of Kendall’s multitude of bad habits, and he liked even less being painted as The Enabler, which he definitely wasn’t. He’d steered clear of the whole shit show that was Kendall’s life after that, until he’d found out that Kendall was poised to take over the company and that, coincidentally, his marriage was over. His reaction to both had been to look for his own opportunities.

It was always a slippery slope with the Roys, though, because here Stewy is, getting roped in as Kendall’s only hope by random Roy cousins. And here he is, feeling a twinge of relief as Rava finally breaks and says, “Fine. I’ll try calling - Shiv, maybe. See if I can get any bites.”

Before he can say anything, she adds, “But I don’t want to be involved. I’m serious, Stewy.”

“Sure,” Stewy says. “No, I’d hate for you to get involved. With Kendall Roy’s life.”

“Oh, fuck off,” Rava says, and if there’s any amusement on her face it’s buried under too much regret and exhaustion for him to see it. 

If he wanted to continue indulging in the kind of sentiment that’s gotten him into this mess, he could stay longer and see if he can drag a real laugh out of her, give her a real break from the tedium and wreckage that he imagines life as a Roy divorcée must be. 

He could do that, but he absolutely does not want to.

“Well,” he starts, standing up, “you’ve been more than generous with your time.”

“That’s me,” Rava says, raising her eyebrows and smiling thinly. “Generous.”

He leaves before she shoves him bodily out the door, but it’s a close thing.

—

Back in the car as it flits through the rainy afternoon traffic towards his meeting with Sandy, his contacts start to come through. 

There’s less than he’d hoped for or assumed there would be, even given the success the Roys generally have with keeping shit locked down. Usually the leaks come from Kendall’s bitchy but strategic ‘anonymous’ tips, or bitter relatives and/or ex-employee who think they’ve found a loophole in their NDA. But everything he’s getting now is vague, outdated, or both. Kendall was at Columbia, and now he isn’t. He had seizures and then he stopped. His medical file is full of redactions like he’s a fucking Kennedy, and Stewy’s not willing to throw away leverage on unredacting them just to see the results of a SPECT scan that Kendall probably didn’t even need.

It’s absurd. Stewy feels absurd, wading through the glossy tatters of useless emails that don’t tell him anything he actually wants to know. He can’t go to Sandy with nothing - and what he has now qualifies, from a perspective of stirring up shit with the other stakeholders, as close to nothing. 

He’d cancel the meeting, but that would be even worse. He and Sandy are a similar kind of carrion bird, and while that makes for a convenient partnership now, he doesn’t trust Sandy as far as he could throw him. Even being financially necessary to Sandy’s plans doesn’t mean Sandy won’t fuck him over the second they’ve finished fucking over Logan Roy together. Plus, he suspects that Sandy either definitively wants to fuck him, or definitively doesn’t want to. Either possibility disturbs him.

So he compromises, and calls him. 

It’s quick. Sandy doesn’t like phone calls, nobody who knows anything does. That’s a group that includes Stewy, and so he’s eager to keep it short as well, just enough to pique Sandy’s interest without sounding like a moron haring off after tabloid rumors - or even worse, someone with a weak spot for Kendall. 

So he gives Sandy the basics: the overdose, the hospitalization, the family lockdown. Sandy’s skeptical but interested, as always, and Stewy hangs up feeling back on track. He redirects the driver to his apartment, and is considering a bump when his phone buzzes with a text from Rava.

_Shiv bit. He’s in Iceland. He says he doesn't remember anything.  
_

He’s pulling up a tab for plane tickets when she texts again:

_She thinks he’s lying._


End file.
